Daily Tech Digest by Kannan Subbiah

March 14, 2016

A Bulletproof DevOps Strategy to Ensure Success in the Cloud

First, you need to understand the solution patterns of the applications you’re looking to build. For instance, will there be data-intensive or processor-intensive applications, or a mix? Will the applications require any special hardware or software requirements, such as HPC or IPC middleware? Finally, consider security, performance, monitoring, governance — basically all of the core details that make up your requirements shopping list. Keep in mind that you’re not looking to solve the problem of a single application, but selecting a core cloud architecture that can accommodate most of the applications that will be built, tested, and deployed using your DevOps automation solution. Also, keep in mind that it’s okay to use multiple target clouds for deployment.

How InteraXon plans to monetize meditation–and more

The company’s headband is essentially a meditation coach. Muse works like an electroencephalogram (EEG), measuring the user’s brainwave activity and transmitting the data to an app. When your mind is at rest, the app plays audio of calm winds. When your mind begins to wander, the winds intensify to prompt you to refocus. At the end of a session, the Muse app tells you how well you performed and displays a graph of your brain’s activity. It’s a high-tech approach to an ancient practice, one that’s becoming more popular among busy professionals who recognize the benefits of meditation but don’t have time to attend a class

The top 12 cloud security threats

Many developers make the mistake of embedding credentials and cryptographic keys in source code and leaving them in public-facing repositories such as GitHub. Keys need to be appropriately protected, and a well-secured public key infrastructure is necessary, the CSA said. They also need to be rotated periodically to make it harder for attackers to use keys they’ve obtained without authorization. Organizations planning to federate identity with a cloud provider need to understand the security measures the provider uses to protect the identity platform. Centralizing identity into a single repository has its risks. Organizations need to weigh the trade-off of the convenience of centralizing identity against the risk of having that repository become an extremely high-value target for attackers.

Surprising tips from a super-hacker

Mitnick hacks as a kind of performance art in keynotes and talks at security conferences around the world. At CeBIT in Germany this year, for example, he performed several hacks including a demonstration showing how simply plugging in a thumb drive could give a hacker total control of your machine, including the ability to activate and monitor the camera and microphone or launch any program. In the hack, the USB thumbdrive tricks the laptop or PC into thinking it's a keyboard, rather than a storage device. That enables the hacker to inject keystrokes, which means he can do anything to your device that he could do by typing on your keyboard. Mitnick demonstrates this hack because "people think USBs are safe now, because they turn off 'auto-run.'" He wants the public to know that thumbdrives are not safe.

How to Reach a Competitive Advantage Through Huawei Open Source Solutions

Standards bodies continue to produce solid architectures and protocols. But they are slow and resist change. Traditional SDOs will remain relevant but must evolve. The MEF is a perfect example of doing it right. The MEF created a collaboration program, involving key industry standards development bodies, called MEF Unite. Instead of digging in its heels and resisting change, the MEF has put off its ego and begun collaborating with ... As providers (working with their vendors) customize the code, to make it unique to each company, they have created a competitive advantage. Vendors that offer customizable, and supported, solutions will succeed. Red Hat has proven the success of this model. Vendors and providers that quickly adapt to the open source world and learn to differentiate will have a future. Those that don’t will fail.

CIO and the Digital Dilemma

Gartner predicts that by 2018, controlled shadow IT will contribute up to 30 percent of IT operations activities, up from 15 percent in 2014. CIOs are recognizing that by investing and championing the introduction of new, digital services that are capable of accelerating growth while not undermining the effectiveness of pre-existing systems, IT will shift from being seen as strictly a cost center to becoming revered as the business’ competitive weapon. Thus a digital transformation is set to motion. With the likes of AirBNB, Amazon and Uber (to name a few), digital technologies are fueling economic growth at an exponential rate by establishing strong market positions and opening up new business models on which to capitalize. But that’s only the beginning.

Data Security Trends: Shifting perceptions on data security

Although the C-suite might be more involved in data security than in the past, IT teams feel executives still are not allocating the energy or resources needed to properly address data security challenges. ... there are concerns that senior executives don’t pay enough attention and aren’t well informed about data security issues and tools. The findings also show that 3 in 4 decision makers say their C-suite plans to increase current security measures, and more than half expect to spend more money on data security in the coming years. However, cost is a concern when it comes to building on existing security programs – 53 percent cite cost constraints for why they don’t anticipate adding additional security features in the future, and only 1 in 3 businesses are very confident in their C-suite’s ability to budget enough for data security solutions over the next five years.

4 best practices for implementing external business processes

For CIOs and IT managers, working out external business processes like EDI and collaborating on business process projects with hundreds of different business partners can be a daunting and frustrating undertaking. "We're in the process of assessing our external business process growth projections for the next three years," remarked one mid-sized company CIO. He was unsure as to which external business processes would be tackled first, but he made these points: He was concerned about the readiness of his staff to team with end business users and users from other companies for effective business process design or redesign to enable the externalization of business processes that were formerly internal. He was also worried about whether security and governance measures were sufficiently robust to support external information exchanges with other companies.

How to stay ahead of cyber criminals in the data breach era

A typical example of an irrelevant information scenario is the “former employee” situation. In this case, an attacker chooses to target a specific user from your list of employees, not knowing that the person no longer works for your organization. Because the employee no longer works for you, that employee should not be taking actions within the company’s network and the network shouldn’t be contacting them. Spotting this suspicious activity can help you prevent data breaches. Global law firm, Locke Lorde, was able to mitigate a cyber attack after catching a former employee using his credentials to access their network. The closer you track the use of irrelevant information, the quicker you can stop data breaches in their tracks.

Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence?

Since depth implies computational power and efficiency, we have focused on very deep neural nets from the start. For example, by the early 1990s, others were still limited to rather shallow nets with fewer than 10 subsequent computational stages, while our methods already enabled over 1,000 such stages. I'd say we were the ones who made neural nets really deep, especially recurrent networks, the deepest and most powerful nets of them all. Back then, few researchers were interested in this, but we kept going, and with cheaper and cheaper computing power, it was just a matter of time before contests would be won through such methods. I am glad to see that the other deep learning labs and companies are now also heavily using our algorithms.

Quote for the day:

"To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture." -- @jaysamit

March 13, 2016

IT's Shift From Service Provider to Business Partner

IT is a business enabler, providing secure and highly available technology solutions that enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of TRS and our members. As such, it's my job to ensure IT is seen by our individual business areas as a true business partner, not just simply a service provider. IT needs to truly understand the business of TRS and be proactive in helping solve business problems and recommend innovations that move our business forward. ... The one thing that is certain in IT is it's going to change. Many times these technology changes have a significant impact on the rest of the business and/or provide an opportunity for improving efficiency. As such, the CIO often finds himself or herself in the position of change agent, promoting and leading enterprise projects that bring about significant shifts in the organization.

Amazon India planning to launch digital wallet

"Building own wallet helps it restrict access to customer data in the company's ecosystem and monetise customer insights," said another person familiar with Amazon India's plans. Amazon did not comment specifically on whether it plans to launch a digital wallet, only saying that it was "always exploring" acquisitions. "Payments are key to the e-commerce ecosystem," said Srinivas Rao, director at Amazon Payments India, in an emailed statement. "Developing a trusted, frictionless and ubiquitous payments ecosystem is critical to our customer-centric philosophy and we will invest in building the capabilities to drive our strategy." Currently, Amazon India uses its gift cards as pre-paid instruments for buying on its online marketplace, offering customers the option to top up these cards for up to Rs 10,000, which is the limit applicable to digital wallets under Indian regulations.

So You Think You Can Agile?

The interesting thing here is that everyone in the market—customers, communities, consultants, vendors and partners—wants the same outcome. Improving the way organisations work to ultimately enhance our way of life as a society: eliminating waste and responding to change quickly and confidently (well, at least that’s what my team and I want).So, one can only live hoping that’s why we're all here—to continue toward autonomy, mastery and purpose and in turn help enterprises do the same. We all want to embrace, educate and coach great outcomes for the people who work in these enterprises. Who doesn’t want to get up and be excited about the day of work ahead and help people improve their capabilities to ultimately create a better society?

Demand for security skills is ballooning: So can former hacker hotbed Romania help?

"Although companies are actively searching for security experts, many of these jobs aren't listed on the web," she says. HR professionals prefer to hire based on referrals. Many engineers are self-taught, building on top of the computer-science knowledge they acquired in school. Developer Gabriel Cirlig says cybersecurity was a hobby he had during high school. ... Cybrary co-founder Ryan Corey says Romanian users have a grasp of the basics but come to training providers to hone more advanced, niche security skills. "While US and UK users tend to take more beginner-level, general-interest courses such as Network+, CCNA and Linux+, Romanian users tend to take higher-level, more advanced security offerings like Malware Analysis and Advanced Penetration Testing," he says.

The Hidden Security Risks of Our IoT Devices

As IoT devices gather more and more data about us and our lives, we as consumers should be extremely concerned about these vulnerabilities. We may not think about it very much, but these IoT devices have collected a lot of information about our private lives. The refrigerator that orders your milk must have some sort of payment method set up with the grocer. Your thermostat knows when you are likely to be at home – and also when you are not. And your smart watch or wearable fitness tracker may have private information about your health and habits that you wouldn’t want anyone but your doctor to know. Last year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report urging IoT manufacturers to put security first with these new technologies.

Why Are We Fighting the Crypto Wars Again?

Is it any wonder that the government is rebooting the crypto wars? For the first time, it’s really struggling with the results of the first war, as more information is now encrypted, increasingly in a manner the government finds really hard (or impossible) to decode. Apple has been impressively aggressive in its refusal to comply with that order, even though this test case involves possible information from a murderous terrorist. The company’s court filings outline with withering precision how complying with the government order — to essentially rewrite part of its operating system, an action it regards as an act of “compelled speech” — violates its rights and compromises the rights of its customers. With John Oliver-strength sarcasm, it refers to the software the FBI has ordered it to produce as “GovtOS.”

One API, Many Facades?

When developing an API that is going to be used by others, it’s important not to break that contract. Often, frameworks and tools allow you to generate an API definition from the codebase — for example, with an annotation-driven approach where you label your endpoints, query parameters, etc. with annotations. But sometimes, even if your own test cases still pass, the smallest code refactoring could very well break the contract. Your codebase might be fine, but the refactoring might have broken the code of your API consumers. To collaborate more effectively, consider going with an API-contract-first approach and make sure your implementation still conforms with the shared agreement: the API definition. There are different API definition languages available and popular these days, like Swagger, RAML, or API Blueprint. Pick one you’re comfortable with.

Big Data: Why You Must Consider Open Source

“There are multiple – and at this point in history, thoroughly validated – business benefits to using open source software.” Among those reasons, he says, are the lack of fees allowing customers to evaluate and test products and technologies at no expense, the enthusiasm of the global development community, the appeal of working in an open source environment to developers, and the freedom from “lock in”. This last one has one caveat, though, Kestelyn explains – “Be careful, though, of open source software that leaves you on an architectural island, with commercial support only available from a single vendor. This can make the principle moot.” The literal meaning of open source is that the raw source code behind the project is available for anyone to inspect, scrutinize and improve.

Web Application Firewall: a Must-Have Security Control or an Outdated Technology?

Gartner predicts that by 2020, more than 60 percent of public web applications will be protected by a WAF. However, in 2015 Gartner had only one vendor listed in its WAF MQ as a Leader (Imperva), and only two vendors listed as Visionaries. All other vendors are either Niche Players or Challengers. Many more WAF vendors were simply not present in the MQ for not meeting the inclusion criteria. Last year, security researcher Mazin Ahmed published a White Paper to demonstrate that XSS protection from almost all popular WAF vendors can be bypassed. XSSPosed prior to announcing its private and open Bug Bounty programs, published new XSS vulnerabilities on the largest websites almost every day and was effectively an insightful resource for observing just how security researchers bypassed almost every WAF mentioned in the Magic Quadrant.

Data Is a Toxic Asset

Our Internet search data reveals what's important to us, including our hopes, fears, desires and secrets. Communications data reveals who our intimates are, and what we talk about with them. I could go on. Our reading habits, or purchasing data, or data from sensors as diverse as cameras and fitness trackers: All of it can be intimate. Saving it is dangerous because many people want it. Of course companies want it; that's why they collect it in the first place. But governments want it, too. In the United States, the National Security Agency and FBI use secret deals, coercion, threats and legal compulsion to get at the data. ... When a company with personal data goes bankrupt, it's one of the assets that gets sold. Saving it is dangerous because it's hard for companies to secure. For a lot of reasons, computer and network security is very difficult. Attackers have an inherent advantage over defenders, and a sufficiently skilled, funded and motivated attacker will always get in.

Quote for the day:

"Informed intuition, rather than analytical reason, is the most trustworthy decision-making tool to use." -- G. Moore

March 11, 2016

RSA 2016: Data compliance beyond the firewall

The feedback from RSA from security professionals was that you need to start with a data classification policy and you need to start considering how to isolate the data from where it resides. So, if you look at new solutions that allow you to manage your encryption keys around the data, regardless of where the data is structured – solutions such as Ionic, for instance – you’ll see that it’s a new way of looking at data storage and at the implications of where you store data. That said, to do it the right way you need not only technology, but you most likely need help from your in-house solicitor to make sure you fully master the legal ramifications of where your data [resides]. And that’s notwithstanding any requirements for e-discovery, where you may need to get access to data.

Is Breach Notification A Part Of Your Incident Response Plan?

Don’t notify too early. You’ll be criticized either way, so let the investigators help uncover as much information as they can about what happened to help you better communicate the facts. Consider issuing a hold statement in the meantime – something that states you’re aware of the issue. Define what constitutes a breach vs a security incident in your business partner and service provider contracts. This is important from a cyber insurance claims analysis perspective to help with breach notification costs. Cultivate relationships with local law enforcement, your local FBI and secret service gurus – before a breach event. Go above and beyond state attorney general expectations and be proactive with engaging with them during a breach event; you don’t want them to hear about the breach in the news before you tell them.

Got a new USB-C device? 19 accessories that will help

There's a new USB in town -- the Type-C port. Smaller than the familiar USB Type-A, the USB-C plug uses the latest USB 3.1 specification, which means it's not only faster but reversible, eliminating the frustration of trying to insert a USB plug upside-down. Able to carry up to 100 watts of power (six times the USB 3.0 limit), a USB-C port can deliver up to 10Gbps -- double that of current USB 3.0 devices. Although USB-C has been on its way for some time, there haven't been a lot of devices that use it -- until recently. Apple's 12-inch MacBook started the trend last year and was followed by other laptops , tablets and smartphones. And that's only the beginning. The problem: All those micro-USB and mini-USB hubs, cables, chargers and adapters that you've collected over the last several years can't plug into your new USB-C port.

What is bimodal IT and what does it mean for the CIO?

Put simply, bimodal IT involves running two separate modes of IT delivery within a business; one is a traditional, safe execution model, while the second is more exploratory, agile and fast. The approach is of particular interest to enterprises with legacy IT because it allows tried-and-true, existing systems to continue underpinning core business processes while newer, more agile delivery models work alongside them, without having to deal with the disruption of ripping everything up and starting again. But what could bimodal IT look like on a practical level? A useful analogy is thinking of bimodal IT as a swimming pool with two lanes: a fast lane for slower, more careful swimmers and another lane for faster, more agile swimmers.

Between SSL-cylla and Charib-TLS

The last 12 to 15 months has seen a significant upheaval in the threat landscape for securing Internet communications. In late 2014, security researchers at Google published the details of an attack they called POODLE (for Padding Oracle on Downgraded Legacy Encryption), which exploited a deficiency in one of the most common security protocols used on the Internet, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), and allowed an attacker to determine the encryption key used in a supposedly secure connection and decrypt the data in transit. Despite the fact that this particular protocol was developed by Netscape in the 1990s and had been replaced by a better protocol called Transport Layer Security (TLS), version 3 of the SSL protocol (SSLv3) remained in popular use for many years.

Global regulators shape the future of LTE-U, LAA

A hastily-assembled consortium, the LTE-U Forum (LTE-Unlicensed Forum), defined a set of loose rules explaining how LTE could work in 5GHz, with some modifications that they claimed would ensure co-existence with Wi-Fi. The goal of LTE-U was to get product to market quickly in the US, establishing working trials and networks without delay and meeting the commercial requirements of its proponents (selling and deploying new gear as soon as possible). Meanwhile, work started on the European regulators. The movers behind LTE-U lobbied the global cellular standards body, 3GPP, to develop standards that would satisfy ETSI. Since 3GPP-ETSI is a multi-year exercise, this was envisaged as a slower, parallel path to the LTE-U-FCC work.

The next big threat in hacking — data sabotage

"Criminal enterprises — they look for levers within society that are economically tuned to helping them make money," said IOActive's Miessler. "If you could tweak a credit score and get a better rate on money and you're making money by borrowing at better rates, these are things criminal enterprises look at — their ability to modify the system in some way to get an economic return." Manipulating credit scores or bank account numbers is a natural evolution from yesterday's big data breaches, where the personal information on millions of U.S. shoppers, health-care patients and government workers could already be in use for such manipulation schemes. "That's the interesting thing about integrity attacks — they can be highly beneficial to the attacker in that they can often achieve their goals more effectively than a traditional attack," said Steve Grobman

Europe’s CIOs examine impact of new data protection regulation

CIOs must help their businesses to recognise the importance of sanctions emanating from the GDPR. The regulation presents a new challenge, but the current situation regarding data protection is far from ideal, says Jacobs. A company operating across Europe might have to deal with as many as 28 different data privacy regimes. CIOs should see the GDPR as an opportunity, she says. Rather than data protection being a complex puzzle, the regulation should help to provide legal consistency across Europe. “The principle of creating a single regulation across many countries is a good idea,” she says. “But there have been many lobbies around the detail of the regulation and the exact text will not be known until later this year.”

Bitcoin Technology Will Long Outlive Digital Currency

"Bitcoin, if it became broadly accepted, would challenge states’ dominance of the economy. It is designed to prevent monopoly by states or other entities, building a new currency based on shared information and making it hard for any entity to gain control. Politics disappears and a combination of technology and cryptographic proofs is conjured up in its place," he wrote. "Unfortunately, the magic is wearing off. Some of the technological innovations associated with bitcoin will stick around. The political project will not. Rather than overcoming conventional politics, bitcoin is succumbing to it," he wrote. The problem is centered around bitcoin's blockchain, which is a public, decentralized ledger that records every single bitcoin transaction.

The Next Big Thing In Big Data: BDaaS

As well as the “firehose” of tweets it provides analytics tools and applications for making sense of that messy, unstructured data and has trained 4,000 consultants to help businesses put plans into action to profit from them. Another is agricultural manufacturers John Deere, which fits all of its tractors with sensors that stream data about the machinery as well as soil and crop conditions to the MyJohnDeere.com and Farmsight services. Farmers can subscribe to access analytical intelligence on everything from when to order spare parts to where to plant crops. The arrival of Apple’s Watch – perhaps the device that will bring consumer wearables into the mainstream – will doubtlessly bring with it a tsunami of new BDaaS apps.

Quote for the day:

"People will work for a living but they'll die for recognition." -- Lee Odden

March 10, 2016

Designing a modern enterprise architecture

The reason enterprise architectures must change is the confluence of high-speed connectivity and decades of exponential Moore's Law improvements in computing power. This has enabled cheap smartphones to saturate the market and utility-scale IT service providers to create cloud services. Together, these technologies have catalyzed dramatic changes in business. Whether you call it the New Economics of Connections (Gartner) or the Unbounded Enterprise (AT&T Bell Labs), it means businesses, and consequently IT systems and applications, will increasingly interact not just with people, but devices, virtual objects, and other software in the form of automated business processes and intelligent devices.

Biggest-Ever Blockchain Trial is Only the Beginning

Grant described the trial in similarly ambitious terms, indicating that it sent four technology providers specifications for the test – Chain, IBM, Intel and Eris (which delivered versions of the concept on its platform and Ethereum) – that included design specs for three specific trading scenarios. "We had [banks] issuing, trading and redeeming commercial paper, and we had every one of those banks do that in the platform," Grant said. He explained that all banks were encouraged to transact with at least one other bank over the course of the trial, with Grant suggesting that "at least 60 trades" were completed in the simulations. No real funds were exchanged as part of the test. Grant suggested that two of R3’s partners declined to participate due to what he called a "significant resource requirement".

Is DevOps good or bad for security?

Miller views that as one of the benefits of DevOps. “Because CD emphasizes having a code review process, small check-ins and rapid mitigation come with it. If you can deploy four or five times a day, you can mitigate something within hours.” The same applies to spotting breaches, says Sam Guckenheimer from Microsoft’s developer tools team. “With DevOps, you're worried about things like mean time to detect, mean time to remediate, how quickly can I find indicators of compromise. If something anomalous happens on a configuration, you have telemetry that helps you detect, and you keep improving your telemetry – so you get better detection, you get better at spotting indicators of compromise and you get better at remediation.” Continuous deployment makes life harder for attackers in two ways, Guckenheimer explains.

Context is king: Aruba founder talks about future of wireless

Speaking about upcoming wireless standards, Melkote said that 802.11ad would rise to prominence within the next two years. The 60GHz technology doesn’t propagate over great distances or through thick barriers, but offers the possibility of very high throughput. “Initially, it was envisioned as a high-speed replacement for cable,” he said. “If you’re trying for coverage, it’s not the right technology, but if you’re trying to provide capacity, it can be a good technology.” But he cautioned that it is still very early in the game where 802.11ad is concerned, and that there aren’t even chipsets yet available. “The big thing that I look for here is the economics – can you get to a price point that is palatable for the end user?” Melkote said.

The Data Science Puzzle, Explained

While one may not agree entirely (or even minimally) with my opinion on much of this terminology, there may still be something one can get out of this. Several concepts central to data science will be examined. Or, at least, central in my opinion. I will do my best to put forth how they relate to one another and how they fit together as individual pieces of a larger puzzle. As an example of somewhat divergent opinions, and prior to considering any of the concepts individually, KDnuggets' Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro has put together the following Venn diagram which outlines the relationship between the very same data science terminology we will be considering herein. The reader is encouraged to compare this Venn diagram with Drew Conway's now famous data science Venn diagram, as well as my own discussion below and modified process/relationship diagram near the bottom of the post.

The Benefits of Hiring Freelance Big Data Experts

One of the major benefits gained from going the freelance route is flexibility. Instead of hiring a full time data scientist to oversee all big data projects within an organization, the company instead hires on a per project basis. This is especially important for smaller businesses, since the time between big data projects at that level can often be lengthy. Passing over the full time option means a business wouldn’t have to worry about paying a big data expert when they have nothing for them to do. Hiring based on the project means a smarter use of limited resources. This added flexibility also leads to choosing data experts based off of their individual talents. For example, if a big data project requires hiring a data scientist with expertise in sales, the small business can do so. Their fees aren’t based off of a salary but rather on the milestones reached in the project.

Digital Hijackers – the rising threat of ransomware

Ransomware is a cyber version of kidnapping, with the same motives: money. It works like a virus that secretly encrypts files. Victims don’t get the key until paying the ransom. It’s as if instead of a thief stealing your car, they took the car keys and put them in a safe left in your garage. You don’t get the combination to the safe, and use of your car unless you pay up. ... As the attacks have gotten more advanced and correspondingly expensive to develop, they have also become more costly, with an average ransom of about $300 per infected host. What is an extortionate annoyance to someone trying to get their family photo library back can be a significant business expense, both in the ransom itself and the indirect costs of operational disruption and cleanup, when faced with a data center full of affected systems.

Defining 'reachability' on the global Internet

Each geographic market has Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that connect customers to the Internet, and those local ISPs connect to larger ISPs that ultimately connect to geographies all over the world. Your website sits in data centers or in the cloud with its own Internet connectivity. This combined connection path between your website and these ISPs is how you get to different markets. These days, every business is Internet based, which means your customer can come from any market. Even a North American-focused company is still concerned about dozens of important markets. Global companies can be connecting to customers in up to 800 markets. Knowing how well your web assets can reach a market allows you to plan business expansion, plan cloud, CDN and hosting investments, and tune your application and performance metrics by market.

VMware Virtual SAN: The Technology And Its Future

The economics of storage are skewed in favor of all-flash for an increasing number of use cases. For me, our experience with the Virtual SAN cluster deployed as part of the Hands-On Lab (HOL) infrastructure in VMworld 2014 was an eye opener. The storage workload generated by 100s of concurrent, constantly churning Labs is not very cache friendly (no surprise here). As such, the VMware IT team used a large number of spindles for the capacity tier of Virtual SAN to deal with the workload “escaping” the cache. In other words, the spindles were needed for performance, not capacity. We realized that an all-flash hardware would require fewer capacity devices and it would cost less! And that was already the case back in 2014. The main challenge with the high-capacity, low cost SSDs is their low endurance (typically below 1 device-write per day guaranteed for 5 years).

What is IT Service Brokering? Find out in this recent paper

In a very simple and easy-to-understand way, Moore explains the differences between cloud service brokering and service brokering, and why brokerage in IT is needed. He analyzes what makes up a service broker and what parts are IT’s responsibility, such as APIs, micro-services and application services. Moore discusses where to start to become a service broker as well as some initial challenges that IT needs to overcome. Service broker is a new operating model for IT and multiple steps, some substantial and time consuming, are needed. Moore talks about navigating this transition throughout the automation, orchestration and transformation phases. Digital disruption is real, and for IT, among many other aspects, it brings a new type of integration delivery.

Quote for the day:

"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure." -- Paulo Coelho

March 09, 2016

How to avoid collaboration overload

How your business take advantage of collaboration without pushing your most valuable employees straight into a burn-and-churn cycle? The answer is data, says Duggan. Being able to track projects, collaborative efforts and interpersonal dependencies is key to making sure no one is taking on too much, and that workloads are distributed evenly so that bottlenecks don't occur, he says. Duggan says that the number-1 barrier to operational efficiency is accurate tracking of interdepartmental dependencies. In the past, CIOs and managers would direct their teams to focus solely on their own projects and the result was a very siloed organization; over the past decade collaboration has become the norm and so the emphasis must change to understand the rewards versus the risks in that new mindset, Duggan says.

5 Chrome extensions that reduce distraction while you work

Time online is more likely to kill productivity than enhance it. Think of all the work hours you’ve wasted scrolling through your Facebook feed or going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. But with the right Chrome extensions, you can minimize these distractions and actually increase your productivity. ... If you don’t like the reports you’re getting from TimeStats, you need this extension. Rather than blocking websites outright, StayFocusd lets you allot the amount of time you can spend on your favorite distractions. But once you reach that limit, the site is blocked for the rest of the day. StayFocusd is very configurable. In addition to blocking entire sites, it lets you control access to specific subdomains, paths, pages, and content

Cyber security tools tend to pile up. Here’s how to rationalize them

Companies often begin the security rationalization process after accumulating a portfolio of tools over the years (i.e. penetration testers, web-application, and code scanners) or through mergers and acquisitions or shifting business strategies. If your organization has typically purchased every tool, the practice is a great way to spot redundancies. For those who have postponed major purchases, the rationalization process will highlight gaps or where too little attention has been paid and there may be vulnerabilities. Put simply, the best rationalization projects enhance new and more customer-centric ways of delivering services by seamlessly integrating IT into business processes - even as demand grows exponentially.

These technologies will blow the lid off data storage

"Very soon flash will be cheaper than rotating media," said Siva Sivaram, executive vice president of memory at SanDisk. Meanwhile, Seagate has demonstrated its heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) for HDDs, which will enable data densities of more than 10 trillion (10Tbits) per square inch. That's 10 times higher than the areal density in today's highest density HDDs. Seagate expects to work with equipment makers in 2017 to demonstrate HAMR products for data center applications, and in 2018 the company expects to begin shipping HAMR drives to broader markets. These recent technology advances are just the latest chapter in the long story of ever-growing storage needs forcing innovations to meet the new demand.

15 Data Security Policies Ignored by Modern Workers

IT isn’t the only department stretched thin. In the past 20 years the economy has grown nearly 60 percent. Corporate profits have increased 20 percent. And wages have stagnated for most Americans. The workday goes from 9 to 7 and the U.S. is among a small club of nations that doesn’t require time off. See the trend? Despite data security policies, everybody is working fast and hard in a dangerous, connected world. At this breakneck speed, IT policies—designed to educate employees and manage risk—are white noise for the modern worker. Clearly, both parties in this relationship have to change—and clearly, that change won’t be easy. In the meantime, IT can buoy data policies with smart technology that does what employees won’t—like continuously back up laptops to ensure business continuity in the face of anything.

Is this the future of the Internet of Things?

Ambient intelligence could transform cities through dynamic routing and signage for both drivers and pedestrians. It could manage mass transit for optimal efficiency based on real-time conditions. It could monitor environmental conditions and mitigate potential hotspots proactively, predict the need for government services and make sure those services are delivered efficiently, spot opportunities to streamline the supply chain and put them into effect automatically. Nanotechnology in your clothing could send environmental data to your smart phone, or charge it from electricity generated as you walk. But why carry a phone when any glass surface, from your bathroom mirror to your kitchen window, could become an interactive interface for checking your calendar, answering email, watching videos, and anything else we do today on our phones and tablets?

The organisation that runs the internet address book is about to declare independence

Barring any last-minute hiccups, though, something remarkable will happen at the meeting. After two years of negotiations, ICANN is set to agree on a reform that would turn it into a new kind of international organisation. If this goes ahead, a crucial global resource, the internet’s address system, will soon be managed by a body that is largely independent of national governments. And some of ICANN’s champions reckon this is just a start. In future, similar outfits could be tasked with handling other internet issues that perplex governments, such as cyber-security and invasions of privacy. The beauty of the internet is its openness. As long as people stick to its technical standards, anybody can add a new branch or service.

Applying the Scientific Method in Data Center Management

Recently, scientists at the State University of New York at Binghamton created a calibrated model of a 41-rack data center to test how accurately one type of software (6SigmaDC) could predict temperatures in that facility and to create a test bed for future experiments. The scientists can configure the data center easily, without fear of disrupting mission critical operations, because the setup is solely for testing. They can also run different workloads to see how those might affect energy use or reliability in the facility. Most enterprise data centers don’t have such flexibility, but they can cordon off sections of their facility as a test bed, as long as they have sufficient scale. For most enterprises, such direct experimentation is impractical. What almost all of them can do is create a calibrated model of their facility and run the experiments in software.

IoT in education: Gonzaga taps ITSM to manage device growth

"The reality of IoT is creeping into organizations ... but it is showing up to college campuses in force," Coppins said. Other EasyVista higher education customers include Fordham University, Samford University, the University of Barcelona and Villanova University.Schools are indeed taking notice of IoT in education, judging from the IoT-focused conference tracks at recent higher education gatherings. In November 2015, the semiannual meeting of the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education, for example, featured an IoT session. The session's introduction asked, "What do we do when our students arrive on our campuses in Internet-enabled vehicles, wearing Internet-enabled clothing, carrying eight to 10 Internet-enabled devices and with clear expectations that our systems can support them?"

How will blockchain technology transform financial services?

Evangelists say the possibilities are limitless. Applications range from storing client identities to handling cross-border payments, clearing and settling bond or equity trades to smart contracts that are self-executing, such as a credit derivative that pays out automatically if a company goes bust or a bond that regularly pays interest to the holder. Some go as far as to suggest that the technology even offers the potential to disrupt companies that have forged reputations as “disrupters”, such as Uber and Airbnb. At its core, blockchain is a network of computers, all of which must approve a transaction has taken place before it is recorded, in a “chain” of computer code. As with bitcoin — the first application of the technology, applied to money — cryptography is used to keep transactions secure and costs are shared among those in the network.

Quote for the day:

"Data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not understanding, understanding is not wisdom." -- Clifford Stoll

March 08, 2016

Use a BPM strategy to modernize legacy applications

As is nearly always the case, enterprise architecture may provide an easy path if an "EA model" is available. It would be fair to say that for a major enterprise to modernize legacy applications on a large scale, it should never proceed without first developing an EA model according to one of the established standards such as TOGAF. Where the scope of application modernization projects is more limited, it's possible to recover business process definitions from current applications. Where you have no EA framework for direct BPM mapping, take application workflows and "abstract" them by grouping application features into the business processes they support.

The Other Side of Agile: Ceremonial Development

As you can see, ironically, the Agile Manifesto is very simple. Good Agile practices are much more in the spirit of Kaizen and continuous improvement, as opposed to the sterile doctor prescription of do’s and don’ts that most people associate with Agile. And when I come to realize it, the most successful teams that I’ve worked with have excelled exactly at this — responding and adapting to change. These teams were great at what they did because they had mechanisms in place for the team to continuously improve its own delivery. Truth be told, they weren’talways great because of their code reviews. Or pair-programming. Or Stand-up meetings. Or user stories. These things were sometimes very important in the delivery, but once something becomes routine, it can be hard to take a step back and evaluate if it is still delivering on its value proposition.

Seagate Reveals World's Fastest SSD

Seagate's new SSD is based on the non-volatile memory express (NVMe) interface, which was developed by a cooperative of more than 80 companies and released in March 2011. The NVMe specification defined an optimized register interface, command set and feature set for SSDs using the PCIe interface -- a high-speed serial computer expansion bus standard used in both enterprise and client systems. Intel's SSD 750 series drive, which also uses the NVMe/PCIe interface. The SSD sports read speeds of up to 2,500MB per second or 2.5GB per second. "The unit could be used in an all-flash array or as an accelerated flash tier with hard-disk drives (HDDs) for a more cost-effective hybrid storage alternative," Seagate stated in a news release about the new SSD.

Interview: Laura Galante, FireEye

“How are we not able to solve this problem? Because we don’t have visibility into it? The suspicion is the data is probably sitting there in the private sector because everyone is feeling this too. The perfect marriage was Mandiant sitting there with all of this investigation data and thinking, what if there is something huge here and IP is going out the door? We didn’t know how to think about it, and Mandiant needed intelligence so they hired a few of us out of government to figure out what the data was, how to model and analyse it and that is just what we did.” Galante worked on the APT1 report that was released in February 2013, and this allowed her to see network data on the host side and not just on the network, and understand what malware is sitting there that sends out these alerts.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling in Indian IT Firms

It is not uncommon for women to face unconscious biasness at work, which may impact them negatively and make them feel out of place in a male largely male dominated industry like technology. For instance, unconscious bias can happen when male team members put in long working hours for a project while the female workers may leave the office at fixed times. This can be misconstrued as the male workers contributing more to the project, whereas in reality, both male and female employees could be contributing the same, or the latter even more for that matter. Organizations are now actively working towards mitigating gender bias and bring in more transparency that would make women feel more inclusive.

Bimodal IT strategy opens up opportunities for innovation

Today's application lifecycle is measured in weeks, not years, meaning neither customers nor employees have the patience for a lengthy software development process. Organizations that are too slow to capitalize on an emerging digital business opportunity lose out to competitors that move quickly. But such a quick process requires using Agile development practices, fostering close cooperation between developers and IT operations, heavily instrumenting applications to measure performance, feature usage and errors, and employing continuous delivery processes that facilitate a steady stream of bug fixes and feature enhancements.

Scrum is Just a Starting Point | The Clever PM

There is certainly value to be had in looking to prescriptive definitions like those found in the Scrum Guide — they provide us all with a common understanding of the component parts of what that particular publisher or consultancy has defined as “Scrum”. It enables us to have intelligent conversations using such jargon words as Product Manager, Scrum Master, Stand Up, Retrospective, and other terms that have only contextual meaning within the world of Scrum. It also provides those who need guidance and assistance in establishing the foundation for Agile practices with some clearly-defined, specifically-actionable, and proven steps to take and ceremonies to implement to achieve their goals.

DHL Asia-Pacific Innovation Centre incubates future logistics technology

“The innovation agenda is not a new one for DHL,” said Mei Pang, vice-president, innovation, solution delivery and service management at DHL customer solutions and innovation in Asia-Pacific. “From an operational point of view, DHL has always known to come out with new things. In 2007, our corporate office in Germany made a decision to invest in a central team to focus on innovation to look at the future of logistics and identify major trends,” Pang told Computer Weekly. “Part of the initiative was to open a conversation with partners, and the approach we take is a very collaborative one where we work with suppliers, customers and academics to focus on the use cases and try to make them practically applicable in our business,” she added. “That concept worked very well in Germany.”

Intel's Pentium Bug Fix Is Proposed as Solution for Dark Pools

The pitch comes as banks have been beset by fines. UBS was fined $14.4 million by the SEC for problems at its private stock-trading platform. Barclays Plc and Credit Suisse Group AG racked up more than $154 million to settle allegations that they misled investors about how their dark pools were managed. Investment Technology Group Inc. agreed to pay $20.3 million for its infractions. Aesthetic Integration was founded by Denis Ignatovich, formerly head of the central risk trading desk at Deutsche Bank AG in London, and Grant Passmore, a mathematician and expert on formal verification. Passmore said formal verification uses algorithms to analyze other algorithms. Rather than endlessly trying to test possible outcomes, machine reasoning acts like an automated mathematician, creating proofs and theorems to speed up the work.

Testers in TDD teams

The big QA of the Nineties seems history. Many IT organizations have dissolved their QA departments and have spread their testers over Agile teams. However, in many of those teams, the testers are still doing the same manual testing they did in the nineties. Many organizations are therefore still stuck with the same dysfunctional testing they had twenty years ago. The dysfunctionality of Old school QA lies in its excessive use of functional testers. These are professionals specialized in manual testing, but having few technical skills. Their specialization makes functional testers good in 'testing' functionality. However, old school QA has a tendency (and often a commercial interest) to also use these testers to 'check' functionality.

Quote for the day:

"Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor." -- Brian Tracy

March 07, 2016

Making Data Easy for Businesses with Cloud Data Services

By taping into these new cloud data services, they can explore data sources, meld data of different types, select the most appropriate analytics tools, and produce actionable insights. And they can do it without necessarily having to engage the IT department and, in some cases, waiting weeks for answers. It’s a drag-and-drop experience. Or, if they choose, they can enlist the IT department to design more sophisticated analyses. At the same time, these new services offer a host of more sophisticated capabilities designed for data scientists and developers—enabling data scientists to analyze complex situations using the most capable analytics tools and providing software programmers and product teams with a dynamic development platform.

Tech Giants Agree: The FBI’s Case Against Apple Is a Joke

While this seems like a natural cause for the technology industry to rally behind, many tech leaders were initially slow to express support for Apple in the matter. As the New York Times reports, several companies also hesitated to support Apple publicly. Some expressed concern over whether this was the right fight to pick, while others worried about public perception. Those concerns appear to have been allayed, at least on the part of the companies who filed Thursday. Their briefs in support of Apple are unequivocal, and use language as forceful as the company’s own.

The Internet of Things Will Make Big Data Look Small

This looming problem is something we’re sure to discuss at Structure Data, scheduled for March 9th and 10th in San Francisco. We’re featuring speakers such as William Ruh of GE, who will talk about the impact the industrial Internet will have on the manufacturing sector; Jerome Dubreuil of Samsung, who will illustrate just how much data connected home devices generate; and a panel of healthcare experts will sort through the dual challenges of the retiring baby boom generation and an explosion in quantified-self health apps. This may sound like a buzzword salad to many of you. But those in charge of the massive players in this market are making moves to get themselves ready for the data deluge from a realized Internet of things.

Government consults on data sharing

“There is huge potential for improving citizens’ lives through data sharing in the UK,” he said. “This consultation will help make sure we get data right and bolster security while making people’s lives better.” The proposals focus on three aims: improving public services, tackling fraud and debt, and allowing the use of data for research purposes. The consultation also looks at access to identified data that is linked and de-identified using defined processes. It said linked datasets can help “gain new insights into the social and economic challenges that citizens and businesses face”.

Can Trust-Based Private Blockchains Be Trusted?

When collusion occurs amongst blockchain parties, they can rewrite their local records regardless of other parties' interests and protestations. Other parties may not even detect that colluders altered the historical record. Even worse, since there is no way to prove which party has the correct record (ie: the objective state of the ledger), the system breaks with multiple objective states and multiple attendant claims to historical record authenticity, none of which are provable. Using dates to prove the correct objective state of the distributed ledger is both useless and immaterial – data can be backdated, after all, it's just ones and zeros that can be rewritten. So, what happens if the parties choose not to follow the rules and fork the historical record of the blockchain? What mechanisms exist for aggrieved parties to respond to collusion, if detected?

Security ops orchestration for a brave new world

There is a massive shortfall in the number of trained security experts to man a typical Security Operations Center (SOC) monitoring the health and safety of a corporation’s digital footprint. It takes almost a decade for security researchers to acquire the skills to defend against modern-day attacks. Frost and Sullivan has forecast a shortfall of 1.5 million trained security experts by 2020. SOC teams, overwhelmed in handling the deluge of low-impact incidents, fail to respond in time or miss altogether early incident alerts flagging serious attacks. There appears to be a solution to deal with this massive human shortfall and empower SOC teams. Serious efforts are afoot to record process as code — or simply put, to use software to automate repetitive but time-consuming tasks while increasing the productivity of individual security experts.

Decentralized Apps: Key Questions from a Bank Innovation Director

Once you start charging fees for use of your dapps, you have to be clear what you are charging for. Are you charging for the license to deploy an own instance of a smart contract and use of the dapp wallet – a bit like buying an app from an App Store? Or for a service provided by an already deployed smart contract? Arguably, since it is really the miners that provide the service of actually executing and validating the transactions, it’s hard to justify charging a service fee for smart contracts, unless there are many value-add off-chain services bundled together with the dapp. Based on that assessment, we may end up with a 'Dapp Store' model, where folks purchase a license to deploy an instance of a well-written, standards-compliant, tested and proven dapp onto a blockchain.

Regulation holds up P2P lenders - British online banking security

Journalists from the BBC have successfully broken into a team member's bank account using what is known as "SIM swap fraud". The scam works by fraudsters informing the victim's mobile network provider that they would like to swap SIM cards — this means the victim's number is transferred to another SIM. The fraudster with the new SIM now has the number registered to the victim's bank accounts, and can therefore receive any activation code sent by the bank via SMS. The genuine phone is blocked, and the criminal uses the codes to get into the customer's account without needing to know their PIN, passwords or banking customer number.

Mine that data to keep that customer

The ability for financial organisations to make the most of data, monitoring and tweaking performance as they go will have a major impact on all areas of business, from the supply chain to marketing. However, the big retail banking institutions sit comfortably behind the fintech start-up challengers whose business models are founded in the cloud, and whose customers are willing to place their trust in this new approach. Real-time data has a big role to play in engaging with consumers, as it enables organisations to understand their customers’ behaviours and attitudes towards their services, and by extension positively influence customer loyalty. High street banks are starting to recognise the need to get better at segmenting consumers into more narrowly-defined groups, and real-time data and the contextual relevance of engagement have vital roles to play here.

BYOD continues to add challenges for IT leaders

Karsten Scherer, global analyst at TEKsystems has seen a trend in recent data surrounding BYOD, but notes that allowing employees to use personal devices presents unique risks to the enterprise. She suggests that businesses have a strong BYOD plan in place, encourage company-wide security awareness, and acknowledge that a significant portion of breaches are often inadvertently caused by employee negligence, rather than criminal hackers. "Every company has a complex ecosystem of systems creating, storing, accessing and analyzing data," she says. "When you extend that ecosystem to include devices outside of your immediate control, that level of complexity increases. You've effectively increased the size of your security perimeter."

Quote for the day:

"Leadership is unlocking people's potential to become better." -- Bill Bradley

March 06, 2016

Why President Obama’s cyber security plan is one (big) piece of the puzzle

Cyber security is a complicated latticework of disparate yet interconnected elements: public and private entities, domestic and foreign agencies and overlapping legal frameworks. Take the Judicial Redress Act, which President Obama signed into law on February 24. In addition to providing limited access to US courts for citizens of certain countries – court access would be conditioned on covered countries permitting the transfer of personal data – the Judicial Redress Act has other international implications, specifically in the context of US-EU negotiations. The finalisation of the Judicial Redress Act was considered by the European Union as a prerequisite to an umbrella agreement, initialed by US and EU officials last September

Can you take the Internet out of the Internet of Things?

Does it really make sense for every device to have a Wi-Fi chip in either itself or in a gateway, or should all devices route through some always-connected gateway? Based on the growing number of “standards,” varying power, range and data rate requirements, it’s evident there is likely not going to be any sort of IoT topological convergence. This is because, in some cases, a device simply needs to report its proximity to a phone (think beacons), or because a device operating in a challenging RF environment struggles with higher frequency radios used by Thread or Zigbee and are not the ideal technical selection. In many cases, a gateway and a variety of sensors makes total sense.

Exploring Banking as a Platform (BaaP) Model

Network effects impact us all on a daily basis, via social networks and other marketplaces. These same social networks and marketplaces, after having gotten us used to interacting with one another in a different way, are now encroaching on financial services, with payments and lending initially being their target. Smartphones, broadband internet, the 24/7 availability of commerce and data, and social networks have made us organize ourselves very differently than in the past. The Millennial generation, weaned on this new paradigm, now have completely different expectations than their parents or grand parents of communication and commerce. There are other reasons why financial services industry incumbents need to shift to a platform strategy.

Meet tech's new odd couple: the CIO and CMO

While both sides recognize the need for alignment and a joint strategic plan, there remains a disconnect in how each party views its contribution, according to a November 2014 Forrester report on CMO-CIO collaboration. For example, the research, spearheaded by Pattek, found that while about 70 percent of the executives in both groups believe their strategic planning process emphasizes enhancing customer acquisition, retention and loyalty, only 61 percent of marketers think the CIO is actively engaged in that process. In contrast, 76 percent of the IT leaders said the CIO plays an active role. In addition, 70 percent of marketers and 66 percent of tech management executives said they agree that marketing technology plans will gain more support and funding if they're developed jointly by the CMO and CIO.

No, your Raspberry Pi 3 won't overheat in everyday use, says its creator

While a typical workload for the Pi might see the demand on the CPU spike momentarily, in the vast majority of use cases these periods of high CPU utilisation will not be sustained for long periods, he said. "In most use cases you see a very spiky performance profile. So what you're looking at is 'Can I run very fast for a second?' or 'Can I run very fast in bunches of 50ms?'." And while putting a case on the board will increase the temperature, again for the typical user it will not drive the board to become hot enough to throttle its speed - he said. Upton explains the throttling behavior as being a consequence of making the Pi's hardware more powerful.

The Amazing Ways Big Data Is Used In China

The Chinese financial industry is quickly adapting into a Big Data-driven model, too. In 2013 a number of legislation changes regarding use of customer data quickly led to an explosion in the use of Big Data analytics by banks, investment funds and insurance companies. In 2012 it was estimated that the entirety of the heavily regulated Chinese banking industry held around 100 terabytes (100,000 gigabytes) of customer data. By March 2014, just one of China’s “Big Four” banks, the state owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, was said to have amassed 4.9 petabytes (4,900 terabytes, or 4,900,000 gigabytes) of mostly unstructured data. Just as it is in the west, this data is mostly used for marketing of retail banking products.

Artificial intelligence brings its brains and money to London

Both DeepMind and its successors involve “deep reinforcement learning” – giving computers the tools to draw conclusions based on large amounts of data, in the way that humans make assumptions based on experience. The potential applications are vast, from helping doctors diagnose patients to spotting faults in infrastructure such as transport networks – and other uses that even its inventors are yet to conceive of. But measuring progress in AI is not easy. The layperson usually cites the Turing test, developed by Bletchley Park codebreaker Alan Turing in 1950. It focuses on whether a computer can convince a human in a blind test that they are talking to another human. But that test, says Shanahan, is more about “tricking” people through mimicry than developing AI genuinely capable of learning.

Getting the greatest value from your cyber security budget at the end of the financial year

As the financial year creeps inexorably towards its close, you’re probably thinking about the best way of wringing every last drop of value from your budget. If you’re concerned about information security and how it affects your business, why not make the most of your available resources by implementing a best-practice information security management system (ISMS), based on the international standard ISO 27001? ... The good news is that it’s very likely you already have many of ISO 27001’s controls in place, so bringing your current practices into line with the Standard could well be within your grasp. The best way to determine how much work you need to carry out is to conduct a gap analysis.

What Keyboards Do Programmers Prefer?

As developers, we all have preferences in the tools we use for work: a powerful machine, one (or two) large screens, having the freedom to choose our OS, our IDE, etc.... Yet in most companies, we rarely pay the the same level of attention to keyboards. The one that comes with your computer (PC or Mac, desktop or laptop) is often the default choice and we almost never challenge its quality and usability, even though a keyboard is one of the most basic tools of our job, allowing us to perform most of our everyday tasks. So why neglect the quality (and the look!) of a tool that we use eight hours a day? This article is an overview of all the different choices made by the developers team behind the insurance comparison site LesFurets.com. And you'll see how every one of them has an approach of its own.

Strategy, Not Technology Drives Digital Transformation

The ability to digitally reimagine the business is determined in large part by a clear digital strategy supported by leaders who foster a culture able to change and invent the new. While these insights are consistent with prior technology evolutions, what is unique to digital transformation is that risk taking is becoming a cultural norm as more digitally advanced companies seek new levels of competitive advantage. Equally important, employees across all age groups want to work for businesses that are deeply committed to digital progress. Company leaders need to bear this in mind in order to attract and retain the best talent.

Quote for the day:

"Every time you have to speak, you are auditioning for leadership." -- James Humes

March 05, 2016

IoT will crash and burn if security doesn't come first

It's important to understand the damage lax security can do -- to your company and the industry -- and address IoT security early. Hibbard said he has seen firsthand how a lot of players in the space do not consider security as a competitive advantage. "If you're thinking about buying or making IoT, offshoring it to an APAC region, make no assumptions that they're going to know anything about security. You won't be able to retrofit it, so if you want it, order upfront," he said. ... "Show your work," he added. "You need ... to make sure you're properly documenting processes that you went through; you want to make sure you get credit later. You don't want to say to the FTC that you don't have the records."

Global fintech survey results: 51 experts reveal 2016 trends

Payments tech continues to be top of mind for the influencers – followed by security and lending. In 2014, the respondents predicted security technology will be the hottest sector in fintech, however, the sector continues to have a large gap between what is available and what is needed in the market, with a huge interest predicted to continue into 2016. ... 43% of the respondents thought Blockchain adoption by banks will be the single largest trend of 2016. Larger deal sizes, an increased geographical spread and capturing the unbanked market followed with almost an equal amount of interest as the key highlight for the coming year.

Cashless societies: The pros and cons

Thanks to its aggressive adoption of IoT, Sweden is on its way to becoming the world’s first cashless society, according to a study from Stockholm's KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Currently, 80% of payments in the country are made by cards. By the end of 2014, four out of every five transactions in Sweden was cashless. Swedes mainly use debit cards (pin required) and the mobile payment app Swish, which is largely responsible for the nation’s decreasing circulation of cash. Eric B. Delisle, founder of the cyber security company ICLOAK, says the more citizens use cashless systems, which require a computer or device, the more people who have preferred living in an analog world will be pushed into the 21st century. This means new security measures will be needed.

Popular WordPress Plugin Comes with a Backdoor, Steals Site Admin Credentials

The hacker's alterations made sure that he was able to control user login, creation and edit commands, intercepting user data before being encrypted, and sending the user's cleartext passwords to wooranker's server. Furthermore, wp-options.php also created an admin account on the infected website, with the credentials support / support@wordpresscore.com, which he could use if anything else failed. All of this meant that wooranker would always have an admin account on all infected websites, and he would always be notified of what passwords users were using when accessing infected sites.

Bridging the operational technology and Internet of Things divide

By its very nature, a connected world has zero tolerance for downtime yet IoT does not only change the requirement for systems availability; it significantly increases the threat landscape, creating greater security risks and challenges. Indeed, while IT may be willing to accept the fact that a very high proportion of organisations (80%) have experienced outages over the last three years, this fact will not play well within OT, which has actively embraced predictive monitoring in order to achieve 100% uptime. Moreover, organisations are also missing out on essential business information. By failing to consolidate OT into the core network, organisations cannot enable CxOs to take advantage of a depth of real-time analytics that should be informing changes to every part of the building, estate and production systems.

The Trends Disrupting The World of Financial Technology

The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes ... The blockchain is a wild card that could completely overhaul financial services. Both major banks and startups around the world are exploring the technology behind the blockchain, which stores and records Bitcoin transactions. This technology could lower the cost of many financial activities to near-zero and could wipe away many traditional banking activities completely.

How hackers attacked Ukraine's power grid: Implications for Industrial IoT security

Some aspects of the Ukraine cyber-attack remain opaque -- specifically, whether a modular component called KillDisk (a hard disk wiper) actually caused the power outage, or whether it simply made it impossible to restore the compromised systems using SCADA protocols. As if further evidence of a political motive was required, researchers at security companyTrend Micro recently reported that the same combination of BlackEnergy and KillDisk "may have been used against a large Ukrainian mining company and a large Ukrainian rail company" around the same time as the attacks on the power utilities. Whether the perpetrators' ultimate goal was to destabilise Ukraine via coordinated cyberattacks on its critical infrastructure...

Software - Looking into the Future

dominates. Software is changing practically all industries and is the major driver of innovation across all industries. While we used to distinguish components, systems, and services, we today see flexible boundaries driven entirely by business cases to determine what we should package, at which level, and in which component, whether it’s software or silicon. ... Software is getting more complex, more connected, and more life-critical. This complexity’s sources are hidden in the nature of software, which often consists of many components from different vendors and runs on hardware manufactured by different vendors. Also, software teams frequently are multifunctional, and team members are responsible for many activities such as planning, developing, and executing plans, roadmaps, and strategies—without adequate training.

Scrum with Trello

Trello recently passed the 10M user mark and is fast becoming a popular tool for Agile teams of all flavours. Its simplicity and the great web and mobile experience seem to win some teams over versus other more complex solutions out there. It is also pretty un-opinionated on how you use it, which can lead to some confusion as to how best to implement a Scrum process in Trello. I've been talking to a lot of people over the last year about how they're using Trello for their Scrum and Kanban processes, as well as reading everything I could on the internet relating to running Agile processes in Trello. So, today I present to you with the fruits of that labour:

An AI way to make call centre interaction less hideous?

What makes this interesting though, is that it is very different to the usual visions of AI in customer service. These tend to focus on Virtual Assistants – by the likes of Nuance and IPSoft – which want to replace real agents with digital ones wherever possible.In this scenario AI is used to help machines learn from human interactions and these solutions have become part of the “robots stealing our jobs” debate. It is not as cut and dried as many make out, of course. And individuals involved in this type of tech argue that employing Virtual Assistants simply frees up human employees for more sophisticated forms of customer interaction. Yet Farmer is adamant: “We’re the first people to use AI to improve quality [in customer service].”

Quote for the day:

"Authentic leaders will sometimes push and sometimes pull but either way, they will always keep things moving." -- @LeadToday